Nintendo 3DS eShop packs solid features, skimpy lineup

The Nintendo 3DS eShop for downloadable games will launch with a free virtual …

Nintendo of America will launch its slick eShop with very little new content for the Nintendo 3DS, leaning heavily on vintage Game Boy titles and games previously made available for Nintendo DSi, Wired.com has learned.

The downloadable games shop for the company’s 3D handheld will become available after a June 6 3DS system update. While it will function significantly better than Nintendo’s previous digital shopping efforts for its Wii and DSi consoles, the eShop will launch with just five new pieces of software: Three vintage 1989 games from the black-and-white Game Boy library, a 3D enhanced version of the classic 8-bit game Excitebike, and an interactive Pokémon strategy guide.

More than 350 titles from the library of games previously made available for the Nintendo DSi will also be available at launch, and the 3DS Internet browser will be included in the same system update.

Aside from the lack of new 3D titles, there’s another thing gamers won’t find: sale prices. “We believe strongly in maintaining the value of games,” says David Wharton, director of eShop operations, a new group formed inside Nintendo of America in April to handle all digital sales. “The race to the bottom is not in the best interest of the game business.”

To that end, Wharton says that Nintendo has set a rock-bottom price point of $1.99 for eShop games. Of the three Game Boy games available, Super Mario Land will cost $3.99, and Alleyway and Radar Mission will cost $2.99.

Some applications will be free, though. The Pokédex 3D application will be free forever, and Nintendo is giving away the 3D version of Excitebike for the first 30 days that the shop is online.

Wired.com got an early preview of the software, and found the eShop easy to navigate, with detailed search features that allow users to find and preview games. The eShop looks quite a bit like the 3DS’ home menu, a scrolling “shelf” of square icons, each of which represents a category of games.

Wharton says his group has a lot of flexibility in determining what categories to display on the shelf—it could use the interface to promote all the games in the Mario series, for instance, or to push two-player games, games that start with the letter W, etc.

When you’re trying to decide on a game, you’ll be able to view up to six dual-screen screenshots and six dual-screen videos of each title. Nintendo has toyed around with the issue of whether to release demo versions of games, but Wharton did not show us any such functionality in the eShop demo.

If you already own games on your DSi, you’ll be able to transfer them over to your 3DS, Wharton says. When the eShop goes live, a System Transfer application will be uploaded to the DSi shop. You’ll download that to your DSi system, then use it to move the games over. Once you move the games over, they will be deleted from your DSi and left on your 3DS. If you have games on both a DSi and a DSi XL, you can transfer them all to a single 3DS, Wharton says.

The Game Boy games are simple ROM dumps of the classic titles with no tweaks. The only option players have is that they can view the games in solid black-and-white colors, or in the classic gray-and-green scheme that more closely mimics the original Game Boy’s low-power display. (Wharton pointed out that Super Mario Land and Alleyway were two of the games that Wired.com editors asked for in a recent feature. True enough. Only 28 more to go!)

Nintendo says it will add games from the TurboGrafx and Game Gear consoles later.

3D Innovation in revamped Excitebike

Excitebike is the first classic game that will be given a 3D facelift on 3DS, Nintendo said. It will be available for free for the first 30 days

Nintendo

The 3D Classics line is a different beast entirely. Excitebike is a “rebuild,” says Wharton, programmed from the ground up without using the original NES game’s code. While the motorbike racer plays just like the classic game, it also has a vastly improved track editor that uses both of the 3DS’ screens for easy editing and lets you save 32 of your creations.

Most interestingly, it includes a use of the 3D slider that I’ve never seen before. When you adjust the slider, it doesn’t just change the depth of the 3D effect. It actually changes the camera angle of the game. When you dial down toward the 2D setting, the camera zooms in and shows a closer view of the biker. When you make the 3D more intense, the camera pulls back to show a wide-angle shot of the stadium’s bleachers far off in the distance.

Nintendo has never talked about the ability of the 3D slider to actually change a game’s camera angles before, so this was a surprising moment that indicates far more functionality in that hardware feature than we originally surmised was there.

Pokédex 3D will be loved by Nintendo’s army of Pokémaniacs. It is an intricately detailed list of the 150 new Pokémon creatures in the Black and White games that includes every scrap of data about them. Of course, it’s not that easy: While each game will be seeded with 16 random Pokémon, to get the other 134 you will need to download them via Nintendo’s SpotPass service or trade them with friends.

The eShop is certainly an improvement over past iterations, but it still lacks key features. First and foremost, although the lowest price for a game is $1.99, you can only add funds to your “wallet” in amounts of $5, $10, $20, and $50.

You can’t create an account that saves your personal details and credit card information; you have to enter your card details each time you want to add funds. Besides being inconvenient, this means that games are still tied to an individual piece of hardware, not to a persistent user account.

There is no “redeem code” functionality at present. What this means is that unlike the iTunes store, PlayStation Network, or Xbox Live, 3DS won’t have promotional codes that allow you to download a specific piece of software. This is one of the major ways Nintendo’s competitors promote their digital games, by giving out codes to fans as contest prizes or as giveaways.

Additionally, it’s how writers like me play games so we can review them before they’re released. Wharton says Nintendo is working on figuring out some way to let writers review games before they come out so we can let you know which games to watch out for.

Nintendo is also making a tweak to when it releases eShop games. It will now send out the press release announcing new games on Mondays, but release the games on Thursdays. This will give gamers some heads-up as to what new software is arriving and give indie developers a window to do some promotion.

In short, Nintendo 3DS eShop is launching not with a bang but with a whimper. Three black-and-white games and one 8-bit remake, even though they are fan-favorite titles, remain a small substitute for new, original, 3D games. The selection might improve after a few months of releases, but for now there’s nothing to get really excited about.

Nintendo points out that eShop is a “service, not a game” and that the company will update it with more robust features. We hope that the formation of a new eShop group within Nintendo of America signals that the company is doubling down on its efforts to sell games digitally, and that these necessary features will come soon.